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You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].
You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].


=Laptop News 2008-02-09=
=Laptop News 2008-02-16=


1. Lima: Ivan Krstić, Walter Bender, and Edgar Ceballos spent much of the week working closely with Oscar Becerra Tresierra’s team within the Peruvian ministry of education on the details of the Peru deployment.
1. Embedded controller: Richard Smith found a few more “corner cases” where the the EC side of the command protocol can “wedge.” He also discovered—while looking at the kernel's EC SCI handler—that the “unwedge” workaround only works when the EC is reporting up a single byte. EC command failure does not seem to show up on Richard’s testbed and there have not been many reports from the Joyride users with symptoms that would match this failure mode; therefore, these fixes will not make Update.1—we don’t want to hold up the release for the necessary testing and QA; they should appear in the next release. The current round of EC code appears to be holding up well.


2. The Inter-American Development Bank announced that it will finance a pilot project to test whether one-to-one computing can improve teaching and learning in schools in Haiti (the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere). The IDB will make a $3-million grant for the pilot project, which will distribute XO laptops to 13,200 students and 500 teachers in 60 Haitian primary schools. The OLPC Foundation will contribute XO laptops to the project through the Give One Get One program.
2. Batteries: Field reports of batteries that will not charge continue to trickle in. The symptoms are all identical: during a charge the voltage profile changes in such a way that the EC thinks the battery is fully charged and it marks it as such; but since it only received a few mAh of charger when the XO goes on to battery power is shuts off in a few minutes. Nothing so far indicates that it is a EC software problem, but Richard is not ruling it out until he has had a chance to work with the suspect batteries. A sampling of RMA with these batteries are on their way to Richard for examination and return to the manufacture for deeper analysis.


3. Laptop hardware: We have approved an engineering change to a lower-cost stainless steel for the metal components of the laptop. This was done in response to a sharp rise in cost of the particular alloy we had been using. Drop tests and corrosion tests run by Quanta show no change from the current material.
3. Power usage: Richard continues to gather data and analyze the power consumption of the XO laptop while trying to auto-suspend under “real world” conditions. (Many people have offered to gather data for him.) Based on data gathered in the OLPC offices, laptops don’t stay in auto-suspend while not being actively used: there is a constant stream of wake-ups. This skews the result heavily towards a shorter battery runtime. To get an accurate profile of the actual activity level, these wake-ups need to be eliminated or minimized. The prime suspect is the WLAN: an XO laptop that auto-suspends not in the noisy RF environment of the OLPC offices will stay in suspend until user activity or the low battery wakeup occurs.


4. Power: Richard Smith has been investigating what it is going to take to provide an off-grid solar system that will be able to run a school server for eight hours a day (the Peru challenge). With SJ Klein's help, he has engaged the community, where he is finding great interest this problem; we will leverage this interest by working with some community testing sites on the long-term testing of a solar-power systems. Specifically, the OLPC chapter at the Illinois Math and Science Academy is talking to Richard about testing solar panels and other materials through a green- energy project they have underway. The same project is already collaborating with a research group at Fermilab studying new energy sources.
Chris Ball provided Richard with some power readings from our newly enhanced power tinderbox running a C2 (mass production) laptop. It allows us to sample the power draw of the various sub-systems while in sleep, something that the olpc-logbat script cannot do. The top auto-suspend power-draw breakdown:


5. Embedded controller (EC): Exercising the EC charging system with “spiky” input power has uncovered a bug: the EC seems to get confused. Although it turns on the charge light, the charging circuit is not enabled. Richard is investigating the root cause.
{|
|-
|WLAN||734 mW
|-
|backlight||362 mW
|-
|memory||239 mW
|-
|LCD||218 mW
|-
|EC||108 mW
|-
|other||339 mW
|-
|'''total'''||'''2064 mW'''
|}


6. Multi-battery charger: Lillian Walter has made excellent progress on the firmware: it now detects battery insert and removal; it enables or disables the charging channels; and it is upgradeable via the USB and serial port. When the prototype hardware is ready, the firmware will be in good shape for testing. Bitworks received the first round of plastic parts off of the tooling and some of the smaller sheet metal parts. These parts are on their way to Gecko for inspection and approval. The new PCB with the design changes for a cooler-running charger is finished and sent out for fabrication. Unless the parts have serious fit problems, the end of February still looks good for the first complete mechanical assembly using these test parts.
The “other” category seems high, but it includes the switching regulator efficiency loss across all categories. A more details audit of these numbers will happen in the future. The good news is that the 2W total matches what olpc-logbat reports as being the average for a 4.5 hour uninterrupted suspend session so measured matches reality. The bad news is that this works out to only about 8.5 hours of battery life with no wakups. To get to greater than 10 hours, we are going to have work out methods of determining when we have been inactive for extended periods and turn off both the LCD and backlight under those conditions. We have timers in the system that will do this under normal non-suspended operation, but auto-suspend currently prevents these timers from ever expiring. For long auto-suspends, the only LCD and backlight power savings we get are from freezing the display and dimming the backlight. Recovering over 500mW in the extended-suspend case would make a big difference in the “no interruptions” test case which is an upper bound. (Note that in “eBook” mode, the backlight is off, providing additional power savings.)


7. School server: John Watlington doesn’t have a new build to announce this week; however, he does reports that the build environment seems stabilized (Look for an announcement on server-devel@laptop.org soon). There are three new groups using the server software in anticipation of deployments in Nepal, Pakistan, and South Africa; thanks for all of their help testing and improving the software. We are planning for a week-long network test and debug session in Cambridge starting on 25 February. The goal is to recreate some of the scenarios we are seeing in the field in order to prioritize the bug fixes that will make the biggest (positive) difference for our deployments.
A next step will be to see if the wireless power can be reduced during suspend. Currently the suspend/non-suspend power draw for the WLAN module is the same. When the driver and firmware are mature enough, we will be able to fine-tune the power draw under both conditions.


8. Firmware: Mitch Bradley implemented a change to the secure-startup process so that it will continue booting even if there is insufficient power to reflash the firmware. This is in response to reports from the field as OLPC begins mass deployments; upgrades were leaving some machines “stuck”—they would not boot without upgrading the firmware, but did not have the redundant power sources (both battery and line power) required for upgrading the flash.
The EC also has a low-power mode that is not utilized in suspend. More recent requirements of the EC have it doing things that involve watching timers. Refactoring the code such that the EC can sleep and still do its chores will be a pretty invasive change. But as the more low-hanging fruit is picked, turning that 100mW into 1mW will be targeted.


9. Schedules/releases: Release Candidate (RC) 2, Build 691 went through testing this week. We are already working on RC 3 as there were some important bugs found with mesh sharing, translations that are ready to go, and activity updates that need to get in. Build 693 is available this weekend for developer-only testing—it is not signed yet. At the same time we are trying to wrap up Update 1, we have already started collecting requirements for Update 1.1 based on feedback from our first deployments (Uruguay, Mongolia and Peru).
4. School server: John Watlington spent time this week working with a three-server mesh at the OLPC office in Cambridge. Scott Ananian turned the mesh testbed back on and we quickly saw the network become unusable. We are working on registering every laptop in the office to see if that helps. In the meantime, he has setup a school server on a different mesh channel in preparation for next week's learning workshop. It has already been used to show that problems with sharing and inviting friends to join activities experienced around the office are related to the network load, not the presence of a school server.


We are looking for some help from the community for testing builds as the become available—especially as we get close to the final Update 1 release candidate. Please visit the test wiki pages ([[Test_issues]]) to get started.
5. Multi-battery charger: Bitworks has provided Richard and Lilian Walter with the second-round prototypes of the charger PCB with five channels loaded. This lets the firmware development continue. Various discussions with the manufacturer of the DC–DC converter chip have flushed out the causes of higher than expected temperatures; a third round of prototypes should fix these issues. The first test plastic and sheet-metal parts from the fabrication tools have been produced and Gecko has been working with the manufacturer fixing the issues that always arise with new tooling. A full set of parts to assemble some complete units are expected at the end of February.


10. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta spent the first part of the week testing the PO files of all languages for errors. The testing was followed up by a massive push of all translations to the master Git repository at dev.laptop.org in order to ensure that they are included in Update 1. This also required the involvement of the module maintainers, as they had to release new versions of the module or activity they maintain.
6. Tech team: As part of the restructuring required to meet new challenges, a technology team has been formed to focus on HW/SW development, testing, support, and systems administration (IT). Over the next week we will define goals, work with the other teams (development and deployment) to understand their needs, and outline a plan for resourcing and meeting those goals.


Localization is becoming a larger part of our efforts and synchronization of localization slows the release process. We need a strategy that will allow for retroactive localization so that we do not have to do software releases in order to pick up additional language support.
7. Schedule/testing: Update.1 RC2 (release candidate 2) was made available on Friday (http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/candidate/691/jffs2/); it is signed and ready for testing. Please help test this build (See [[Test_issues]] and [[Update.1]]).


Sayamindu has been working on enhancing the glossary for the translators, so that they can define a standard translation for commonly used terms, and also to ensure consistency between translations done by different people on different files. This involved taking into account all terms that are repeated more than
8. SysAdmin/IT: Welcome to Henry Hardy, who joined us this week as OLPC systems administrator.
once in the set of PO files that we have, and creating a glossary PO template (POT) file. He has initialized a discussion in the localization mailing list, so that translators can provide their inputs, and once we reach a consensus, we will start utilizing the glossary in Pootle to ensure consistent translation.


Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj”, our volunteers from Afghanistan, report that Update 1, XO Bundled, XO Core are complete. 3000 strings (12%) in Etoys are also complete.
9. HW/SW Development: This week the first 100 G1G1 users had Build 656 pushed to them automatically. We are only pushing this build to people running Build 649, 650, or 653. Basic information about update streams (and how to unsubscribe your laptop) is available in the wiki (See [[Update_streams]]). Expect to see Build 656 pushed more broadly over the coming weeks.
As a demonstration, electronic versions of Afghan textbooks (two Dari and two Pashto) were downloaded from the ministry of education website and successfully tested on the XO laptop. Also, an electronic picture book of traffic signs in English and Dari was prepared. The team also developed a Dari weblog of the OLPC project, which is updated daily from the laptop.org website (Please see http://www.olpc.blogsky.com).


An XO laptop user manual in the Dari language has been completed and the Pashto version is 90% done. Alas, the volunteer working on this project went to visit his family in Afghanistan and is currently stranded in a remote region due to heavy snow. We are awaiting his safe return.
Scott also shepherded Update.1 rc2, 691 (See http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/candidate/691/jffs2/). Preliminary release notes are at [[Test Group Release Notes#Build 691 Q2D13 .28RC2.29]].


11. Presence service (PS): Dafydd Harries spent this week working on Gadget, the Jabber server extension for activity indexing. It is at the point where it can be told about activities and answer queries about which activities exist. Morgan Collett released Chat-35 for Update 1 with the updated translations and a fix for the problem with copying web links (Ticket #6066).
10. Sugar: Reinier Heeres finished up his coop for OLPC. Not only did Reinier finish up the the calculator activity in the OLPC system he created, he also fixed many other bugs in Sugar as part of the UI team during his coop period.


Daf and Morgan reached agreement with Brian Pepple (who does the Telepathy packaging for Fedora) to build in the F-7/F-8/Rawhide branches with minimal side effects for Fedora users.
Simon Schampijer debugged a visual-control problem with Xulrunner (Ticket #6133) with Marco Pesenti Gritti. (It is probably an X driver bug.) He provided a first fix for a problem with the browser crashing when visiting certain web sites (Ticket #6108). The rest of the week was spent in testing.


Guillaume Desmottes completely removed the “registered” flag from sugar's profile (#6295) and investigated and wrote a fix for Ticket #6299: “presence service should disable salut in the presence of school servers on mesh.” He also started to design and implement a PS test framework
Marco started on the code refactoring planned for Update.2. In particular the toolkit modules was split out into a separate package to ease maintenance and make licensing more clear. Also it's not necessary anymore to set SUGAR_PATH and SUGAR_PREFIX to run sugar or scripts such as the control panel. Marco built packages of Sugar and dependencies for Fedora 8 (this work is still in progress). The goal is to have something easier than jhbuild for people to develop activities or try out Sugar on a non-OLPC distribution. With Jani Monoses working on the Ubuntu packages, we should be able to cover a large part of the user community.


Morgan did some preliminary testing for Guillaume's fix for #6299. It will require further testing this as soon as it is in Joyride. In a related bug (Ticket #6475), Morgan fixed a problem that was causing Pippy to crash on launch when there was no Telepathy connection.
Marco also worked with the Pentragram and Eben Eliason on a Sugar demo for an upcoming MoMA exhibition, which will be open to the public.


12. Kernel: Andres Salomon dealt with the local root exploit issue; he also merged 2.6.25-rc1 into master, a “painful” process. He continued the process of pushing stuff upstream: battery driver cleanups, lxfb stuff, etc. Andres realized that we still have ancient gxfb patches in our tree; he therefore got a GX sparrow box up for
Tomeu Vizoso is work on a possible solution to the slow startup time for activities. It is still too soon to know if or when his patches will land in our builds, but looks promising. Potentially, we could eliminate all initializing work not
testing these kernel patches.
specific to activities.


13. Sugar: Tomeu Vizoso fixed two issues, one in Sugar and the other in the Journal, that caused some translations to not appear in the UI. This got into an Update 1 build. Tomeu also released a new Paint activity with updated translations. And he has started implementing a redesign of the Home view and the Frame.
Tomeu added some notes about he Sugar architecture to the wiki (See [[Sugar Architecture]]). The page is still incomplete; if you are interested in working on it, Tomeu will gladly answer any questions. He also added pointers to tickets to the pages in the wiki about the datastore redesign (See [[Category:DatastoreRedesign]]).


Chris Ball released a new version of Pippy.
And, working with Jani, he fixed some license issues in the Sugar packages that will allow our packages to get into the Ubuntu 8.04 release in April. If things go as expected, Ubuntu users will be able to choose at boot Sugar as a desktop. Hopefully this will attract more users and developers to Sugar.


Dan Bricklin, Luke Closs, Manusheel Guptam, and Eben Eliason have continued to make progress on the SocialCalc project (See http://www.peapodcast.com/sgi/olpc/). Recently added features include: copy/cut/paste; basic support for CSV and tab-delimited data; merge/unmerge cells; insert/delete row/column; sort. A new multiplication table sample document has also been added. The performance of operations such as sorting is quite good, making the activity useful for maintaining lists of hundreds of rows of data. Graphing support is at an initial stage of development. They are coordinating with Edward Baafi, Luke Closs, Tomeu Vizoso, Marco Gritti, and Todd Whiteman to develop a communication channel between Python and Javascript code through PyXPCOM.
Sayamindu Dasgupta spent time helping Simon and Marco track down the cause of Browse activity slowing down after an upgrade from the Ship.2 release to the Update.1 RC release (Ticket #6046). It turns out that this is being caused by a combination of different issues—we believe that we have tracked them all down. Sayamindu has a new fontconfig package that takes care of issue #6048 along with a new version of Rainbow. The package is in Joyride and will be in the Update.1 release.


The University of São Paulo LSI research team has been in discussion with Manu and Eben in regard to the Paint activity. “Smudge” and “Blur” brushes will be added soon.
Erik Blankinship and Faisal Anwar at Media Mods created a screencasting activity this week to make it easy to create videos of what is happening on your screen, complete with audio narration. Also, Media Mods' newest version of the Record activity, which offers improved stability, made it into the Update.1 Release Candidate this week. Coming next to the Record activity is a control panel for adjusting image and audio settings, exif data, and some new recording modes: stop-motion and time-lapse.


Arjun Sarwal reports progress on a number of sensor-related fronts:
Arjun Sarwal continues to work on the Measure activity; he is exploring graphing/plotting packages that can display logged data within Measure in a variety of different representations. After discussions it emerges that such graphing functionality would be useful in conjunction with a spreadsheet-like interface that can read data logged by the Distance activity (Acoustic Tape Measure) as well. Arjun is working on making Measure read and write data in CSV format so that the SocialCalc activity might be able to load and display the logged values.
* Arjun completed work on Measure Activity, writing its log files in CSV format in anticipation of integration with the spreadsheet activity (the plan is to have Measure generating a separate Journal entry for each log file it creates so that other activities can access these data);
* he worked with the Matplotlib packages to integrate within Measure spreadsheet-like interface and graphing interface (See http://dev.laptop.org/~arjs/pass1.png);
* he fixed a Rainbow-related bug that was preventing Measure from writing its log files and released an updated version, which also includes updated translations, for Update 1;
* he demonstrated TurtleArt with Sensors at the the Learning workshop (A group of attendees programmed the turtle to log sensor values at a periodic interval within a set of axes—see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure#Screen_shots);
* Edward Baafi made $2 IO/sensor board that plugs into the USB port of the XO (the board provides two 10-bit ADC inputs).


14. Power management: Chris Ball worked on an API for activities to temporarily inhibit suspend, motivated by the continuous measurement mode of Distance (which does not currently inhibit suspend but should). Chris is looking at inhibiting suspend whenever the camera or microphone is in use. Chris also released a new version of OHM.
Arjun discussed with Richard Boulanger the sensor opcode in Csound; more development on that front is expected to happen in the coming weeks. Finally, he spent time talking with Alexis Soffler regarding how she may be able to incorporate low-cost sensor peripherals into a chemistry curriculum that she is developing for the XO laptop, the first one being a low-cost temperature sensor probe.


15. Releases: Dennis Gilmore spent the week working on Update 1. He also spent some time working with Mako Hill on packaging. He also spent time moving whats on mock.laptop.org onto pilgrim.laptop.org.
11. Presence server: Morgan Collett has been working on documentation for presence and collaboration. See [[Category:Collaboration]] for the pages of Telepathy and Presence Service. Morgan also started a roadmap for presence that currently just documents open Trac items, but as we discuss priorities and features he’ll add more description: [[Talk:Presence_Service#Roadmap]] (feel free to comment there on anything not suited for a Trac comment).


16. Security: Michael Stone provided software for fixes to several bugs and changes of policy related to root shells: “become_root is broken” (Ticket #6316); “use sudo to get root; limit root to olpc” (Ticket #5537). He also fixed a problem with installing Adobe Flash (Ticket #6411). He analyzed the challenge of USB-based content autoinstallation (Tickets #6425 and #6430). He pushed Marcus Leech’s “olpc-audit” into Joyride and ran it as a means of being proactive in regard to “some dirs in /usr are not readable by the user olpc” (Ticket #5985). Michael also discussed syscalls for isolated “prototype processes” with Andres and made some small updates to the build-system wiki documentation.
Guillaume Desmottes changed the presence-server Jabber-account-registering policy (#6295) and resurrected the video-chat activity, which is now launchable again. He is waiting on new Farsight/Stream-engine packages to start testing; he also fixed some hyperactivity issues and track Salut crashers.


17. OLPC Health: Many thanks to all the participants who made last week's conference call a success. The call covered discussions on a number of aspects ranging from the alignment of the Health initiative with OLPC's vision, to detailed discussions on the organization of content and health peripherals. The minutes and notes are posted on the Health Meetings page in the wiki (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Health_meetings).
12. Translation: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports have new teams for Italian, Marathi, Sinhala, Vietnamese and Gujarati. He has an automated testing script for testing all the translated PO files for errors in the Pootle server. It currently tests only Spanish and Mongolian but Sayamindu plans on covering all languages by the next week. This should prevent build regression bugs due to malformatted or wrong PO files. He has added notes in the wiki on how to utilize the translation testing features in our web based translation management system, Pootle ([[Localization/Testing#Testing the PO files]]). Sayamindu also discovered a few cases where Pootle can become very slow, and discussed these with the upstream developers. They have suggested a few solutions, and he's trying to implement them in our deployment. The shifting of Pootle to the new server had caused some issues to crop up with the GIT integration—he managed to track them down and fix them. Sayamindu is at Gnunify, one of the grassroots level FOSS conferences in India, speaking about the OLPC.


18. OLPC Pakistan: The Pakistan team has undertaken two Quranic studies activities: Quran Read activity and Qiraat activity (recitation of the Quran). Quran Read was created by modifying the Read activity. Waqas Toor has developed prototype of Qiraat Activity. The package is created using Helix media library and Evince library for PDF files.
Arjun built the xkeyboard-config package locally, in order to catch all of the recent changes to the xkb symbol files. Dennis Gilmore has built it on Koji; Arjun has tested it in Joyride and it is now approved to go into Update1.


Dr. Habib Khan reports that the Pakistan Software Export Board has sponsors two interns: we welcome Ms. Sheerehman, a graduate student of IT Management in IIU, and Mr. Asif Rehman a fresh BS from Kohat University, NWFP, Pakistan. They will be helping us in development and testing of OLPC activities over the next three months. Many thanks to PSEP for honoring our request of sponsoring these interns; we look forward for their continued support in the future.
13. Kernel: Andres Salmon pushed more (kernel) code upstream, uploaded mock to Debian (“and hey, it actually works; nice to be able to create Fedora chroots”), and updated yum packages for Debian.


19. Google Gears: SJ spoke to Othman Laraki and Ben Lisbakken of the Google Gears project and with Zvi Boshernitzan of Kiva, who are all working on making Gears a tool for offline mediawiki browsing. They offered help getting Gears integrated into the Browse activity and noted that a patch to make Gears work with FF3-minus-extensions has already been submitted (for use on a mobile platform) so most of the work has been done. Ben will follow up with people working on Browse, and will offer a userspace demo for Wikipedia users, as prelude to getting offline-reader hooks into MediaWiki proper.
14. Security: Michael Stone helped Tomeu debug his “prefork Rainbow-hack: and provided a tentative Rainbow rpm for Scott's “faster” branch. (These are all efforts towards tuning performance.) Michael merged Marcus Leech's “olpc-audit” filesystem permissions checker into olpc-utils; he prototyped patches to Sugar for improving sugar-install-bundle and for making the Journal automatically recognize developer keys and designated bundles on USB keys. Michael “stubbed out” wiki pages for several OLPC-maintained software artifacts and filed packaging tickets on behalf of John and Scott so that he and Dennis can track progress on the relevant packaging work.


20. In the community: Iain Davidson has started a Zine on the wiki (See [[Weekly_zine/0]]).
15. Network: Michail Bletsas met with Latif Ladid, Chairman of the IPv6 Forum. The principle request on our part is for the forum to help us with setting up the necessary school-to-school IPv6 paths that will enable collaboration between children in different schools, countries, continents. Latif followed up with introductions to the two largest commercial IPv6 network operators.


Jonathan Blocksom and Mike Lee have been helping organize the local DC meet-up groups.
Michail had a conference call with SES-Americom. They agreed to provide the (C-Band) space segment and internet termination (via their Maryland teleport) for our upcoming deployment in Haiti.


Olin College is hosting its second OLPC jam this weekend, focusing more on local student involvement, coding, and curation for the CC LiveContent DVD (see below). Nikki Lee and the 20-person Olin chapter are organizing the event.
16. In the community: Peter Harrison and Michael Burns worked throughout the last two weeks to prepare the merging of the olpchelp.org and olpc.osuosl.org forums, which can be found at http://forum.laptop.org/. The migration happened Friday night without a hitch and we have more than doubled (800 users, 4,000 comments) the community discussing and supporting the XO laptop for Give 1, Get 1 donors. The support gang hopes to extend the site to all XO laptop users throughout the world with regional, language-specific forums over time.


With help from Jamil Moledina, Executive Director Game Developers Conference, we're hoping to help connect XO groups with game developers at next week’s conference in San Francisco.
Arjun Sarwal worked with advisors Josh Hehner and Jim Hopper to prepare a draft of the role of advisors document and channels of advising. The draft is posted on the Health page (See [[Health]]); feedback is invited from all. The agenda and other details of a conference call scheduled for 1PM (EST) on Sunday, 10 February, are also posted. Many thanks to all advisors for their support in this initiative.


The XO laptop and Sugar interface will be featured in exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art and a Saatchi and Saatchi event in NYC this week.
Yoshiaki Sonoda, an enthusiastic grass-root volunteer and supporter of OLPC in Japan, is going to make two presentations about OLPC in Japan this month. The objectives are purely to draw people's attention to OLPC and to foster better understanding of OLPC philosophy in Japan. In addition, he hopes more people in Japan will take an interest in OLPC and subsequently contribute their ideas and resources to OLPC projects.


Christoph Derndorfer reports that OLPC Austria will have a presence at CeBIT 2008, which takes place in Hannover during the first week in March.
“OLPC roles in Human Security—from the aspect of Network Centric Strategy” Feb. 8, 2008, at Sunshine Convention Hall, Ikebukuro, Tokyo.

“Learning learning on Macintosh: Squeak Etoys and OLPC” at the Nagasaki Macintosh User Group Monthly Meeting (supported by Apple, Japan) Feb. 23, 2008, at Nagasaki International University, Nagasaki

These activities are supported continually by Mr. Abe, Squeakland.jp and other OLPC Japanese volunteer members.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 17:29, 16 February 2008

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Laptop News 2008-02-16

1. Lima: Ivan Krstić, Walter Bender, and Edgar Ceballos spent much of the week working closely with Oscar Becerra Tresierra’s team within the Peruvian ministry of education on the details of the Peru deployment.

2. The Inter-American Development Bank announced that it will finance a pilot project to test whether one-to-one computing can improve teaching and learning in schools in Haiti (the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere). The IDB will make a $3-million grant for the pilot project, which will distribute XO laptops to 13,200 students and 500 teachers in 60 Haitian primary schools. The OLPC Foundation will contribute XO laptops to the project through the Give One Get One program.

3. Laptop hardware: We have approved an engineering change to a lower-cost stainless steel for the metal components of the laptop. This was done in response to a sharp rise in cost of the particular alloy we had been using. Drop tests and corrosion tests run by Quanta show no change from the current material.

4. Power: Richard Smith has been investigating what it is going to take to provide an off-grid solar system that will be able to run a school server for eight hours a day (the Peru challenge). With SJ Klein's help, he has engaged the community, where he is finding great interest this problem; we will leverage this interest by working with some community testing sites on the long-term testing of a solar-power systems. Specifically, the OLPC chapter at the Illinois Math and Science Academy is talking to Richard about testing solar panels and other materials through a green- energy project they have underway. The same project is already collaborating with a research group at Fermilab studying new energy sources.

5. Embedded controller (EC): Exercising the EC charging system with “spiky” input power has uncovered a bug: the EC seems to get confused. Although it turns on the charge light, the charging circuit is not enabled. Richard is investigating the root cause.

6. Multi-battery charger: Lillian Walter has made excellent progress on the firmware: it now detects battery insert and removal; it enables or disables the charging channels; and it is upgradeable via the USB and serial port. When the prototype hardware is ready, the firmware will be in good shape for testing. Bitworks received the first round of plastic parts off of the tooling and some of the smaller sheet metal parts. These parts are on their way to Gecko for inspection and approval. The new PCB with the design changes for a cooler-running charger is finished and sent out for fabrication. Unless the parts have serious fit problems, the end of February still looks good for the first complete mechanical assembly using these test parts.

7. School server: John Watlington doesn’t have a new build to announce this week; however, he does reports that the build environment seems stabilized (Look for an announcement on server-devel@laptop.org soon). There are three new groups using the server software in anticipation of deployments in Nepal, Pakistan, and South Africa; thanks for all of their help testing and improving the software. We are planning for a week-long network test and debug session in Cambridge starting on 25 February. The goal is to recreate some of the scenarios we are seeing in the field in order to prioritize the bug fixes that will make the biggest (positive) difference for our deployments.

8. Firmware: Mitch Bradley implemented a change to the secure-startup process so that it will continue booting even if there is insufficient power to reflash the firmware. This is in response to reports from the field as OLPC begins mass deployments; upgrades were leaving some machines “stuck”—they would not boot without upgrading the firmware, but did not have the redundant power sources (both battery and line power) required for upgrading the flash.

9. Schedules/releases: Release Candidate (RC) 2, Build 691 went through testing this week. We are already working on RC 3 as there were some important bugs found with mesh sharing, translations that are ready to go, and activity updates that need to get in. Build 693 is available this weekend for developer-only testing—it is not signed yet. At the same time we are trying to wrap up Update 1, we have already started collecting requirements for Update 1.1 based on feedback from our first deployments (Uruguay, Mongolia and Peru).

We are looking for some help from the community for testing builds as the become available—especially as we get close to the final Update 1 release candidate. Please visit the test wiki pages (Test_issues) to get started.

10. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta spent the first part of the week testing the PO files of all languages for errors. The testing was followed up by a massive push of all translations to the master Git repository at dev.laptop.org in order to ensure that they are included in Update 1. This also required the involvement of the module maintainers, as they had to release new versions of the module or activity they maintain.

Localization is becoming a larger part of our efforts and synchronization of localization slows the release process. We need a strategy that will allow for retroactive localization so that we do not have to do software releases in order to pick up additional language support.

Sayamindu has been working on enhancing the glossary for the translators, so that they can define a standard translation for commonly used terms, and also to ensure consistency between translations done by different people on different files. This involved taking into account all terms that are repeated more than once in the set of PO files that we have, and creating a glossary PO template (POT) file. He has initialized a discussion in the localization mailing list, so that translators can provide their inputs, and once we reach a consensus, we will start utilizing the glossary in Pootle to ensure consistent translation.

Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj”, our volunteers from Afghanistan, report that Update 1, XO Bundled, XO Core are complete. 3000 strings (12%) in Etoys are also complete.

As a demonstration, electronic versions of Afghan textbooks (two Dari and two Pashto) were downloaded from the ministry of education website and successfully tested on the XO laptop. Also, an electronic picture book of traffic signs in English and Dari was prepared. The team also developed a Dari weblog of the OLPC project, which is updated daily from the laptop.org website (Please see http://www.olpc.blogsky.com).

An XO laptop user manual in the Dari language has been completed and the Pashto version is 90% done. Alas, the volunteer working on this project went to visit his family in Afghanistan and is currently stranded in a remote region due to heavy snow. We are awaiting his safe return.

11. Presence service (PS): Dafydd Harries spent this week working on Gadget, the Jabber server extension for activity indexing. It is at the point where it can be told about activities and answer queries about which activities exist. Morgan Collett released Chat-35 for Update 1 with the updated translations and a fix for the problem with copying web links (Ticket #6066).

Daf and Morgan reached agreement with Brian Pepple (who does the Telepathy packaging for Fedora) to build in the F-7/F-8/Rawhide branches with minimal side effects for Fedora users.

Guillaume Desmottes completely removed the “registered” flag from sugar's profile (#6295) and investigated and wrote a fix for Ticket #6299: “presence service should disable salut in the presence of school servers on mesh.” He also started to design and implement a PS test framework

Morgan did some preliminary testing for Guillaume's fix for #6299. It will require further testing this as soon as it is in Joyride. In a related bug (Ticket #6475), Morgan fixed a problem that was causing Pippy to crash on launch when there was no Telepathy connection.

12. Kernel: Andres Salomon dealt with the local root exploit issue; he also merged 2.6.25-rc1 into master, a “painful” process. He continued the process of pushing stuff upstream: battery driver cleanups, lxfb stuff, etc. Andres realized that we still have ancient gxfb patches in our tree; he therefore got a GX sparrow box up for testing these kernel patches.

13. Sugar: Tomeu Vizoso fixed two issues, one in Sugar and the other in the Journal, that caused some translations to not appear in the UI. This got into an Update 1 build. Tomeu also released a new Paint activity with updated translations. And he has started implementing a redesign of the Home view and the Frame.

Chris Ball released a new version of Pippy.

Dan Bricklin, Luke Closs, Manusheel Guptam, and Eben Eliason have continued to make progress on the SocialCalc project (See http://www.peapodcast.com/sgi/olpc/). Recently added features include: copy/cut/paste; basic support for CSV and tab-delimited data; merge/unmerge cells; insert/delete row/column; sort. A new multiplication table sample document has also been added. The performance of operations such as sorting is quite good, making the activity useful for maintaining lists of hundreds of rows of data. Graphing support is at an initial stage of development. They are coordinating with Edward Baafi, Luke Closs, Tomeu Vizoso, Marco Gritti, and Todd Whiteman to develop a communication channel between Python and Javascript code through PyXPCOM.

The University of São Paulo LSI research team has been in discussion with Manu and Eben in regard to the Paint activity. “Smudge” and “Blur” brushes will be added soon.

Arjun Sarwal reports progress on a number of sensor-related fronts:

  • Arjun completed work on Measure Activity, writing its log files in CSV format in anticipation of integration with the spreadsheet activity (the plan is to have Measure generating a separate Journal entry for each log file it creates so that other activities can access these data);
  • he worked with the Matplotlib packages to integrate within Measure spreadsheet-like interface and graphing interface (See http://dev.laptop.org/~arjs/pass1.png);
  • he fixed a Rainbow-related bug that was preventing Measure from writing its log files and released an updated version, which also includes updated translations, for Update 1;
  • he demonstrated TurtleArt with Sensors at the the Learning workshop (A group of attendees programmed the turtle to log sensor values at a periodic interval within a set of axes—see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure#Screen_shots);
  • Edward Baafi made $2 IO/sensor board that plugs into the USB port of the XO (the board provides two 10-bit ADC inputs).

14. Power management: Chris Ball worked on an API for activities to temporarily inhibit suspend, motivated by the continuous measurement mode of Distance (which does not currently inhibit suspend but should). Chris is looking at inhibiting suspend whenever the camera or microphone is in use. Chris also released a new version of OHM.

15. Releases: Dennis Gilmore spent the week working on Update 1. He also spent some time working with Mako Hill on packaging. He also spent time moving whats on mock.laptop.org onto pilgrim.laptop.org.

16. Security: Michael Stone provided software for fixes to several bugs and changes of policy related to root shells: “become_root is broken” (Ticket #6316); “use sudo to get root; limit root to olpc” (Ticket #5537). He also fixed a problem with installing Adobe Flash (Ticket #6411). He analyzed the challenge of USB-based content autoinstallation (Tickets #6425 and #6430). He pushed Marcus Leech’s “olpc-audit” into Joyride and ran it as a means of being proactive in regard to “some dirs in /usr are not readable by the user olpc” (Ticket #5985). Michael also discussed syscalls for isolated “prototype processes” with Andres and made some small updates to the build-system wiki documentation.

17. OLPC Health: Many thanks to all the participants who made last week's conference call a success. The call covered discussions on a number of aspects ranging from the alignment of the Health initiative with OLPC's vision, to detailed discussions on the organization of content and health peripherals. The minutes and notes are posted on the Health Meetings page in the wiki (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Health_meetings).

18. OLPC Pakistan: The Pakistan team has undertaken two Quranic studies activities: Quran Read activity and Qiraat activity (recitation of the Quran). Quran Read was created by modifying the Read activity. Waqas Toor has developed prototype of Qiraat Activity. The package is created using Helix media library and Evince library for PDF files.

Dr. Habib Khan reports that the Pakistan Software Export Board has sponsors two interns: we welcome Ms. Sheerehman, a graduate student of IT Management in IIU, and Mr. Asif Rehman a fresh BS from Kohat University, NWFP, Pakistan. They will be helping us in development and testing of OLPC activities over the next three months. Many thanks to PSEP for honoring our request of sponsoring these interns; we look forward for their continued support in the future.

19. Google Gears: SJ spoke to Othman Laraki and Ben Lisbakken of the Google Gears project and with Zvi Boshernitzan of Kiva, who are all working on making Gears a tool for offline mediawiki browsing. They offered help getting Gears integrated into the Browse activity and noted that a patch to make Gears work with FF3-minus-extensions has already been submitted (for use on a mobile platform) so most of the work has been done. Ben will follow up with people working on Browse, and will offer a userspace demo for Wikipedia users, as prelude to getting offline-reader hooks into MediaWiki proper.

20. In the community: Iain Davidson has started a Zine on the wiki (See Weekly_zine/0).

Jonathan Blocksom and Mike Lee have been helping organize the local DC meet-up groups.

Olin College is hosting its second OLPC jam this weekend, focusing more on local student involvement, coding, and curation for the CC LiveContent DVD (see below). Nikki Lee and the 20-person Olin chapter are organizing the event.

With help from Jamil Moledina, Executive Director Game Developers Conference, we're hoping to help connect XO groups with game developers at next week’s conference in San Francisco.

The XO laptop and Sugar interface will be featured in exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art and a Saatchi and Saatchi event in NYC this week.

Christoph Derndorfer reports that OLPC Austria will have a presence at CeBIT 2008, which takes place in Hannover during the first week in March.

More News

Laptop News is archived here.

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Press requests: please send email to press@racepointgroup.com

Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

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You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Laptop News 2008-02-16

1. Lima: Ivan Krstić, Walter Bender, and Edgar Ceballos spent much of the week working closely with Oscar Becerra Tresierra’s team within the Peruvian ministry of education on the details of the Peru deployment.

2. The Inter-American Development Bank announced that it will finance a pilot project to test whether one-to-one computing can improve teaching and learning in schools in Haiti (the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere). The IDB will make a $3-million grant for the pilot project, which will distribute XO laptops to 13,200 students and 500 teachers in 60 Haitian primary schools. The OLPC Foundation will contribute XO laptops to the project through the Give One Get One program.

3. Laptop hardware: We have approved an engineering change to a lower-cost stainless steel for the metal components of the laptop. This was done in response to a sharp rise in cost of the particular alloy we had been using. Drop tests and corrosion tests run by Quanta show no change from the current material.

4. Power: Richard Smith has been investigating what it is going to take to provide an off-grid solar system that will be able to run a school server for eight hours a day (the Peru challenge). With SJ Klein's help, he has engaged the community, where he is finding great interest this problem; we will leverage this interest by working with some community testing sites on the long-term testing of a solar-power systems. Specifically, the OLPC chapter at the Illinois Math and Science Academy is talking to Richard about testing solar panels and other materials through a green- energy project they have underway. The same project is already collaborating with a research group at Fermilab studying new energy sources.

5. Embedded controller (EC): Exercising the EC charging system with “spiky” input power has uncovered a bug: the EC seems to get confused. Although it turns on the charge light, the charging circuit is not enabled. Richard is investigating the root cause.

6. Multi-battery charger: Lillian Walter has made excellent progress on the firmware: it now detects battery insert and removal; it enables or disables the charging channels; and it is upgradeable via the USB and serial port. When the prototype hardware is ready, the firmware will be in good shape for testing. Bitworks received the first round of plastic parts off of the tooling and some of the smaller sheet metal parts. These parts are on their way to Gecko for inspection and approval. The new PCB with the design changes for a cooler-running charger is finished and sent out for fabrication. Unless the parts have serious fit problems, the end of February still looks good for the first complete mechanical assembly using these test parts.

7. School server: John Watlington doesn’t have a new build to announce this week; however, he does reports that the build environment seems stabilized (Look for an announcement on server-devel@laptop.org soon). There are three new groups using the server software in anticipation of deployments in Nepal, Pakistan, and South Africa; thanks for all of their help testing and improving the software. We are planning for a week-long network test and debug session in Cambridge starting on 25 February. The goal is to recreate some of the scenarios we are seeing in the field in order to prioritize the bug fixes that will make the biggest (positive) difference for our deployments.

8. Firmware: Mitch Bradley implemented a change to the secure-startup process so that it will continue booting even if there is insufficient power to reflash the firmware. This is in response to reports from the field as OLPC begins mass deployments; upgrades were leaving some machines “stuck”—they would not boot without upgrading the firmware, but did not have the redundant power sources (both battery and line power) required for upgrading the flash.

9. Schedules/releases: Release Candidate (RC) 2, Build 691 went through testing this week. We are already working on RC 3 as there were some important bugs found with mesh sharing, translations that are ready to go, and activity updates that need to get in. Build 693 is available this weekend for developer-only testing—it is not signed yet. At the same time we are trying to wrap up Update 1, we have already started collecting requirements for Update 1.1 based on feedback from our first deployments (Uruguay, Mongolia and Peru).

We are looking for some help from the community for testing builds as the become available—especially as we get close to the final Update 1 release candidate. Please visit the test wiki pages (Test_issues) to get started.

10. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta spent the first part of the week testing the PO files of all languages for errors. The testing was followed up by a massive push of all translations to the master Git repository at dev.laptop.org in order to ensure that they are included in Update 1. This also required the involvement of the module maintainers, as they had to release new versions of the module or activity they maintain.

Localization is becoming a larger part of our efforts and synchronization of localization slows the release process. We need a strategy that will allow for retroactive localization so that we do not have to do software releases in order to pick up additional language support.

Sayamindu has been working on enhancing the glossary for the translators, so that they can define a standard translation for commonly used terms, and also to ensure consistency between translations done by different people on different files. This involved taking into account all terms that are repeated more than once in the set of PO files that we have, and creating a glossary PO template (POT) file. He has initialized a discussion in the localization mailing list, so that translators can provide their inputs, and once we reach a consensus, we will start utilizing the glossary in Pootle to ensure consistent translation.

Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj”, our volunteers from Afghanistan, report that Update 1, XO Bundled, XO Core are complete. 3000 strings (12%) in Etoys are also complete.

As a demonstration, electronic versions of Afghan textbooks (two Dari and two Pashto) were downloaded from the ministry of education website and successfully tested on the XO laptop. Also, an electronic picture book of traffic signs in English and Dari was prepared. The team also developed a Dari weblog of the OLPC project, which is updated daily from the laptop.org website (Please see http://www.olpc.blogsky.com).

An XO laptop user manual in the Dari language has been completed and the Pashto version is 90% done. Alas, the volunteer working on this project went to visit his family in Afghanistan and is currently stranded in a remote region due to heavy snow. We are awaiting his safe return.

11. Presence service (PS): Dafydd Harries spent this week working on Gadget, the Jabber server extension for activity indexing. It is at the point where it can be told about activities and answer queries about which activities exist. Morgan Collett released Chat-35 for Update 1 with the updated translations and a fix for the problem with copying web links (Ticket #6066).

Daf and Morgan reached agreement with Brian Pepple (who does the Telepathy packaging for Fedora) to build in the F-7/F-8/Rawhide branches with minimal side effects for Fedora users.

Guillaume Desmottes completely removed the “registered” flag from sugar's profile (#6295) and investigated and wrote a fix for Ticket #6299: “presence service should disable salut in the presence of school servers on mesh.” He also started to design and implement a PS test framework

Morgan did some preliminary testing for Guillaume's fix for #6299. It will require further testing this as soon as it is in Joyride. In a related bug (Ticket #6475), Morgan fixed a problem that was causing Pippy to crash on launch when there was no Telepathy connection.

12. Kernel: Andres Salomon dealt with the local root exploit issue; he also merged 2.6.25-rc1 into master, a “painful” process. He continued the process of pushing stuff upstream: battery driver cleanups, lxfb stuff, etc. Andres realized that we still have ancient gxfb patches in our tree; he therefore got a GX sparrow box up for testing these kernel patches.

13. Sugar: Tomeu Vizoso fixed two issues, one in Sugar and the other in the Journal, that caused some translations to not appear in the UI. This got into an Update 1 build. Tomeu also released a new Paint activity with updated translations. And he has started implementing a redesign of the Home view and the Frame.

Chris Ball released a new version of Pippy.

Dan Bricklin, Luke Closs, Manusheel Guptam, and Eben Eliason have continued to make progress on the SocialCalc project (See http://www.peapodcast.com/sgi/olpc/). Recently added features include: copy/cut/paste; basic support for CSV and tab-delimited data; merge/unmerge cells; insert/delete row/column; sort. A new multiplication table sample document has also been added. The performance of operations such as sorting is quite good, making the activity useful for maintaining lists of hundreds of rows of data. Graphing support is at an initial stage of development. They are coordinating with Edward Baafi, Luke Closs, Tomeu Vizoso, Marco Gritti, and Todd Whiteman to develop a communication channel between Python and Javascript code through PyXPCOM.

The University of São Paulo LSI research team has been in discussion with Manu and Eben in regard to the Paint activity. “Smudge” and “Blur” brushes will be added soon.

Arjun Sarwal reports progress on a number of sensor-related fronts:

  • Arjun completed work on Measure Activity, writing its log files in CSV format in anticipation of integration with the spreadsheet activity (the plan is to have Measure generating a separate Journal entry for each log file it creates so that other activities can access these data);
  • he worked with the Matplotlib packages to integrate within Measure spreadsheet-like interface and graphing interface (See http://dev.laptop.org/~arjs/pass1.png);
  • he fixed a Rainbow-related bug that was preventing Measure from writing its log files and released an updated version, which also includes updated translations, for Update 1;
  • he demonstrated TurtleArt with Sensors at the the Learning workshop (A group of attendees programmed the turtle to log sensor values at a periodic interval within a set of axes—see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure#Screen_shots);
  • Edward Baafi made $2 IO/sensor board that plugs into the USB port of the XO (the board provides two 10-bit ADC inputs).

14. Power management: Chris Ball worked on an API for activities to temporarily inhibit suspend, motivated by the continuous measurement mode of Distance (which does not currently inhibit suspend but should). Chris is looking at inhibiting suspend whenever the camera or microphone is in use. Chris also released a new version of OHM.

15. Releases: Dennis Gilmore spent the week working on Update 1. He also spent some time working with Mako Hill on packaging. He also spent time moving whats on mock.laptop.org onto pilgrim.laptop.org.

16. Security: Michael Stone provided software for fixes to several bugs and changes of policy related to root shells: “become_root is broken” (Ticket #6316); “use sudo to get root; limit root to olpc” (Ticket #5537). He also fixed a problem with installing Adobe Flash (Ticket #6411). He analyzed the challenge of USB-based content autoinstallation (Tickets #6425 and #6430). He pushed Marcus Leech’s “olpc-audit” into Joyride and ran it as a means of being proactive in regard to “some dirs in /usr are not readable by the user olpc” (Ticket #5985). Michael also discussed syscalls for isolated “prototype processes” with Andres and made some small updates to the build-system wiki documentation.

17. OLPC Health: Many thanks to all the participants who made last week's conference call a success. The call covered discussions on a number of aspects ranging from the alignment of the Health initiative with OLPC's vision, to detailed discussions on the organization of content and health peripherals. The minutes and notes are posted on the Health Meetings page in the wiki (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Health_meetings).

18. OLPC Pakistan: The Pakistan team has undertaken two Quranic studies activities: Quran Read activity and Qiraat activity (recitation of the Quran). Quran Read was created by modifying the Read activity. Waqas Toor has developed prototype of Qiraat Activity. The package is created using Helix media library and Evince library for PDF files.

Dr. Habib Khan reports that the Pakistan Software Export Board has sponsors two interns: we welcome Ms. Sheerehman, a graduate student of IT Management in IIU, and Mr. Asif Rehman a fresh BS from Kohat University, NWFP, Pakistan. They will be helping us in development and testing of OLPC activities over the next three months. Many thanks to PSEP for honoring our request of sponsoring these interns; we look forward for their continued support in the future.

19. Google Gears: SJ spoke to Othman Laraki and Ben Lisbakken of the Google Gears project and with Zvi Boshernitzan of Kiva, who are all working on making Gears a tool for offline mediawiki browsing. They offered help getting Gears integrated into the Browse activity and noted that a patch to make Gears work with FF3-minus-extensions has already been submitted (for use on a mobile platform) so most of the work has been done. Ben will follow up with people working on Browse, and will offer a userspace demo for Wikipedia users, as prelude to getting offline-reader hooks into MediaWiki proper.

20. In the community: Iain Davidson has started a Zine on the wiki (See Weekly_zine/0).

Jonathan Blocksom and Mike Lee have been helping organize the local DC meet-up groups.

Olin College is hosting its second OLPC jam this weekend, focusing more on local student involvement, coding, and curation for the CC LiveContent DVD (see below). Nikki Lee and the 20-person Olin chapter are organizing the event.

With help from Jamil Moledina, Executive Director Game Developers Conference, we're hoping to help connect XO groups with game developers at next week’s conference in San Francisco.

The XO laptop and Sugar interface will be featured in exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art and a Saatchi and Saatchi event in NYC this week.

Christoph Derndorfer reports that OLPC Austria will have a presence at CeBIT 2008, which takes place in Hannover during the first week in March.

More News

Laptop News is archived here.

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Press requests: please send email to press@racepointgroup.com

Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site. Template loop detected: Press More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

Testimonials about my XO laptop

More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

Testimonials about my XO laptop

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